The first-time writer-director Laura Chinn can’t quite muster enough genuine emotion to get us there, her so-so debut working best when investment is at its lowest.

The director's background in online shorts manifests itself in an occasional, montage-heavy scattiness, and the broadly conventional closing act can't quite maintain the laugh rate, but there's a lot of warm-hearted and commendably daft business along the way.

Lowery’s film mostly plays it safe, only slightly remixing the beats we know a little too well, wrapping them up in a pretty enough package that will get tossed aside and forgotten about once opened. It’s by no means the rockiest trip we’ve taken to Neverland but let’s all pray it’s the last.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things holds a contained, idealized world – a trove of romcom enjoyment and small treasures I had no problem looping through.

A young Russell Crowe is spellbinding in this ugly but unforgettable film that remains hard-hitting and shockingly violent more than two decades on.

It’s a technically impressive work with some lovely images — and a bit of a sugary taste.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

A few laughs.

It’s a diverting private tour.

Dog lovers eager for a dog movie primarily about a dog will be reassured by the knowledge that Dog does feature plenty of dog but they might be a little surprised about what else the film has to offer, an odd and atonal ramble across the US where the dog comes first and plotting comes a long way after.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

Ineffective leading duo and rote script hamper otherwise affecting true story of a couple tackling terminal illness

We’re always waiting for something important or interesting to happen, but it never really does.

Netflix’s flashy RL Stine trilogy continues with a darker Friday the 13th-aping horror that brings more shocking gore and excellent performances.

The documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, explains that his grandfather was a neighbour of Carson’s in the wonderfully named village of Huish Champflower, and he was first shown A Life on the Farm age six. Stretching this curiosity of a man and his work into a full-length documentary is perhaps pushing it.

There is visual interest here, but for me the drama isn’t sustained.

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

The narrative focus is frustratingly split between Ben’s family and Abbie’s, and the result is a non-frightening muddle.

John and the Hole is well enough photographed and acted, but is really an oppressive and exasperatingly pointless piece of work, without consistency or the courage of its realist convictions.

Hare cleverly suggests Nureyev’s mixture of courage, hauteur, emotional damage and cool self-appraisal; the Soviet authorities cannot threaten him through his family because he long ago left them behind. An athletic, confident, undemanding film.

Bale brilliantly captures the former vice-president’s bland magnificence.

There are plenty of Seidl's signature grotesques, extended uncomfortable scenes and hardcore imagery owing something to Lucian Freud and Diane Arbus. But perhaps for the first time there is also a hint of ordinary human heartbreak.

The lifeless direction, the unrefined script, the underwhelming cameos, the distinct lack of fizz – there’s a slapdash nature to the assembly of Ocean’s 8 that makes it feel like the result of a rushed, often careless process. It’s made watchable thanks to the cast but star power alone cannot mask creative inadequacy. Stealing a diamond necklace is bad but wasting an opportunity like this is unforgivable.

This is a long, laborious movie whose every scene feels hackneyed at some level and which is always drifting towards its own misjudged secular gospel of simplistic salvation and life lessons learned. But an artist’s life is more complicated than that.

As much as this gripping documentary is about the mysterious DB Cooper, it is about human nature, too. These brilliant characters, some deeply entangled in the story, some distant from it but connected, are believers. This film asks what keeps them believing, and it is a far bigger question than the mystery itself.

It is so laden with highly charged set pieces, so dappled with haunting ideas and bold flights of fancy that it finally achieves a kind of slow-burn transcendence.

The film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.

While occasionally emphasising that film-making is a collaborative endeavour, this is a cliche-ridden affair, reiterating the myth of the genius director whose pursuit of perfection is worth the detrimental effects it has on the cast, the crew and even the film-maker himself.

This debut feature from the Cambodian-born, London-based film-maker Hong Khaou is heartfelt, intelligent film-making on a shoestring budget.

The Holocaust material was not entirely successful, though certainly transmitted with absolute certainty and sincerity. This Must Be the Place is not my favourite of Sorrentino's films, but it certainly deserved inclusion at Cannes, and deserves to be watched for the glorious Byrne moments alone.

What I can say for sure is You Only Live Twice is the Bond film I have seen most often and I have enjoyed the hell out it every single time.

A wasted opportunity.

Chris Pratt and Tom Holland play teenage elves in this standard-issue but entertaining supernatural quest story.

It’s not the act of raw honesty it thinks it is and it’s certainly not a successful visual album; Lopez’s new songs all sound hopelessly middle-of-the-road – over-produced and under-written, stuck in the early 2000s, a time when her music did have a genuine, exciting electricity. The visuals are similarly dated.

Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart.

If Under Capricorn is not Hitch's crowning glory, it is undeniably his most underrated film.

A tough, sinewy drama about a whole community that wants to look away from others’ differences and its own culpability.

Here’s a defanged, declawed yeti in an animation whose every beat, character and narrative component feels as if it has been algorithmically tested for commercial safety by a computer programme.

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

This sharply crafted piece talks the talk and finally threatens to walk the walk.

The film is bursting at the seams with archival photos, footage and interviews; not to mention outrageous polka dot and bedazzled costumes. The incredible access is expected since Never Too Late is produced by John’s husband and manager David Furnish, who co-directs alongside RJ Cutler. But perhaps that’s why it also feels so precious and tempered.

The camera roams this way and that in the media scrum, and as in subsequent scenes, the dialogue is overlapping and borderline unintelligible. It is bravura work in its way, but unconnected to any real dramatic energy or political point.

Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans. But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley.

It is a study of grief suppressed and a personality becalmed.

The Americans got hold of the much superior Japanese original, Godzilla, and edited into it 20 minutes-worth of Burr, with his vacant and oddly stiff expression, in order to spice things up. Still, without Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, the awesome cinematic hero might have remained a merely regional success, a giant Japanese lizard confined to its own country.

Matt Vesely’s impressive debut ably stakes out its own territory, not least in the vast distances covered by a single on-screen actor and a handful of vocal performances.

Much of it consists of Plankton talking to his frenemies about his marriage. As such, it often feels more like a three-episodes-and-change filibuster than a real movie.

With Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy proved himself to be an adept handler of mainstream 80s comedy, updating the far more farcical (and chauvinist) French original Trois Hommes et un Couffin into something more Hollywoodised and slick. But within the slickness, he let his three leads, Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson shine through with their own individual charm.

But there’s a perkiness that’s hard to resist and a base-level competency that’s hard not to appreciate, a small beam of blue light in an otherwise dark time for superheroes.

The Persian Version feels a bit soft focus some of the time, but it takes on real depth and force when the action hops further back, to 1960s Iran, where Shireen is a 13-year-old girl (now played by Kamand Shafieisabet).

In between songs there's a movie within a movie as Dane DeHaan silently takes on the forces of anarchy on behalf of the band. Awesome.

Trance is a disappointment: a strident, chaotic, frantically overcooked film with an almost deafeningly intrusive ambient soundtrack. There is some embarrassing, eyeball-swivelling acting from the male leads, and the elegance of the film's premise is quite obliterated by its crude and misjudged violence.

Perhaps some of the narrative tension flags between their arrival in Turkey and then the all-important border, but this is a well-acted, spirited piece.

This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.

The film is fun, broad and exuberant, like a primetime Marxist sitcom, although it does feel indebted to a number of recent, better films around the same theme.

Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

It’s a quizzical time capsule of pre-internet fame from the perspective of a troubled but capable young man who knew his way around a camera.

Rob is turned from stereotype to person, thanks to Will’s incredible work and Ejiofor’s unwavering commitment to capturing a full life, supported by Rob’s mother off screen. It’s an involving yet troubling tribute.

Gilroy avoids the ghoulish extremes of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals and offers up a believably pretentious battleground. He’s as invested in crafting a fully fleshed art world as he is in creating a full-on horror film and while the two often blend well, at other times, his concoction is far less effective.

There is something interestingly non-argumentative and personal about this documentary. It is gentle and reflective, a paean to his own youth and idealism that have been preserved in the ice.

It’s a film of people telling themselves they’re making a difference without really doing much of anything and it’s hard not to feel similarly unmoved by the time it’s all over.

It’s the goriest movie of the series so far but without veering into grimness, again that tonal balance perfectly modulated. The last act reveal is as goofy as one would expect but satisfyingly so for reasons impossible to explain without entering spoiler territory.

Some of the acting isn't bad, but the story is messy and unsatisfying with a plot-hole you could drive a dozen combine harvesters through, the ending is an outrageous fudge and the lead performance from Dennis Quaid is strange to say the least.

It has plenty of energy and drive, and Jeremy Renner is really good, better as a Bourne-y agent than Matt Damon, tougher and more grizzled-looking, more convincing as the professional soldier who has grown careworn and disillusioned in the public service.

Nothing in the movie matches the fascination of its premise and its opening 10 minutes: the undisturbed status quo is mesmeric. Once the narrative grinds into gear, however, the film's distinctive quality is lost.

Ken Russell's phallic farce starring Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi is drearily sexist, accidentally absurd and undeniably a stinker. But its defiant disrespect for plot and taste win me over.

It’s tempting to give this more of a pass because the subject is so noble and so few African-made films make it over here, but it has to be admitted that the some of the acting is a bit ropey and the script is a little too on-the-nose at times.

The kids – particularly Zoe Colletti as the sensitive Stella – are very good, and it just about functions as a brainstorm of primal fear scenes, the movie equivalent of a horror-comic summer special: good for the odd giggle and shiver, if naggingly disposable.

The flat hammerblows of The Wolverine bear little relation to the zing and pop of Matthew Vaughn's colourful treatment. Inconsistency is inevitable in a world that's constantly being dug up and done over, but it leaves us no time to fall in love with anything being flung at us.

This movie channels the paranoia and bad faith that’s in the air at the moment and converts it into a thriller of visceral hostility and overwhelming nihilism. It’s all killer, no filler.

Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini.

It’s an exhilarating, alarming look at that much discussed subject: the Russian soul.

Jones certainly shows Mr Burton’s sad and dignified loneliness.

What a shortchanging of Af Klint’s extraordinary life and work this is.

Her photographs are like very bad dreams and simply looking for any period of time at dead bodies is a very strange experience.

There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, with the club sometimes resembling a kind of senior-citizen X-Men group whose collective superpower is invisibility; old people can do things without people noticing them.

Despite the presence of grandfatherly Michael Caine, Kingsman’s tone is about as far from the Christopher Nolan-style superhero film as you can get. Verisimilitude is frequently traded in for a rich laugh. The action scenes delight with shock humour.

This film is a blitz of bad taste, a cornucopia of crass, and it is weirdly diverting – more than you might expect, given the frosty way Suicide Squad was received critically – and engagingly crazy. Watching it feels cheerfully excessive and unwholesome, like smoking a cigarette and eating a chocolate bar at the same time.

It’s Purcell’s powerhouse performance that lends the film its punchier, gritty edge.

It humbly presents the optional but delightful spectacle of watching John Woo have fun again.

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

The Light Between Oceans isn’t subtle – that swoony title should tip you off – and it’s a fair way from the realist grit of the less obviously commercial pictures Cianfrance has made previously. There’s more corn in the recipe here, a bit more ham and cheese. But he carries it off with forthright defiance and with strong, heartfelt, ingenuous performances from Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender.

A fiery Dever gives it more than the film ends up deserving, though, rising to a difficult challenge with both the virtual lack of dialogue and a string of sequences that force her to energetically react to a range of digital effects, a performance that almost saves the movie.